


Azure

by Shamelessly_Radiant



Category: The Little Mermaid (1989)
Genre: Ariel is a princess on land, Eric is a prince of the ocean, F/M, Ficlet, Mermaid Reverse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 03:58:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16905687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shamelessly_Radiant/pseuds/Shamelessly_Radiant
Summary: Her father warns her. Foul creatures live in the ocean. Merpeople, luring people in with their voices, drowning them and eating them. Ariel is not to go to the sea again.She grows sick with longing.





	Azure

Ariel is six years old when she makes her first trip to the sea. It becomes her very first memory: the sea breeze tangling in her red hair, the smell of salt, the dryness of her skin.

For weeks, she needs to press the conch shell she found to her ear as she lies in bed, unable to sleep without the sound of the ocean lulling her into calmness. She demands salt in her bad water and marvels at the way it glistens on her arms. She dips her head underwater and remains as long as possible there, babbling and looking at the bubbles. She only tries to breathe in once; a mistake. She coughs so hard her mother comes in, worried, and wraps her up in her favourite pink towel.

Ariel is nine years old when her mother dies, suddenly, unexpectedly. Her father grows cold, angry. Unable to look at her. Her sisters are sent away to boarding school, but she is not yet old enough. The palace walls are too constricting, the silence too loud, so whenever she can, she steals away to the beach. She buries her feet in the sand, scoops the water up with her hands, swims out as far as she dares and submerges herself to just _look._

The salt doesn’t agree with her eyes, and the water is too dark, but she catches glimpses of animals and of _something_ that almost looks as a human. She tells her nanny, excited, but gets a different reaction than she hoped. Her father calls her to him, and warns her: foul creatures live in the ocean. Merpeople, luring people in with their voices, drowning them and eating them. Ariel is not to go to the sea again.

Ariel cries, begs, rages but her father is steadfast in his resolve. She cuts her hair, but it is not long enough to climb out of her tower. She refuses to speak, she doesn’t do her homework. It is only when she stops eating that her father relents slightly—she can go to the beach, but only with her nanny, and she is not allowed to swim.

Once, she catches sight of what appears to be an enormous fish tail attached to a _human boy?_ Is this, than, the creature her father warned her about? But he looks so calm, so peaceful, so graceful with the sea surrounding him. With this vast eternity to call home. He looks gentle, and beautiful and kind and _free._

She runs to the water before Nanny can stop her, runs into it, mindless of the cold and the way sharp teeth are nipping at her skin. Only crabs, she knows, but her Nanny thinks it to be the Merpeople. Ariel is no longer allowed to go to the beach, no matter how much she pleads and loses weight, this time her father does not relent.

Swiftly, she is sent away to boarding school. A school on the country side, with lush fields and mountains surrounding it. Beautiful sunsets, shimmering snow—miles and miles away from the ocean.

She grows sick with longing.

Ariel is sixteen when she manages to escape the castle. She is there on vacation, as she is every year once a year, and there is a storm raging outside, not a trace left of the sultry August day. From her chambers, she can hear the sea as it clashes against the dams, fighting against its constraints. She can hear an inhuman wailing, as if something, or someone is in pain.

She is running before she even realises it, and is out of the castle without even grabbing a coat. By the time she has reached the ocean she is soaked to the bone, and her vision is hazy from all the rain falling around her. But she sees _enough_ to notice the still form off a boy on the beach. To notice his tail, and his black hair. To know this is the boy from the world she has been dreaming off.

He is hurt, an ugly gash on his forehead, and blood on the rocks. Some scales are missing, as if ripped off, and his arm looks banged up. But he is breathing. She drags him to a cave, one partly underwater. Positions him so that his tail is in the water, and his head on her lap. Washes the gash carrying water with her hands, and uses seaweed to clean his face off sand. It is not ideal, but in this weather there is not much else she can do. Slowly, he comes back to live, blinking one eye open, then the other, and taking a leap into the water as he comes to completely.

“Don’t be scared!” she exclaims, but her pleas are in vain, for he has swam away already. Teeth shattering and heartbroken she tries to warm up as the storm rages outside, and somehow she drifts into sleep somewhere in the early morning hours.

When she awakes, the sun is shining, and the world looks peaceful again. She blinks only to discover a face inches from hers. The boy, the _merman_ , has come back. For a moment, she is afraid for her life, but then he touches her face and smiles. She sees neither claws nor fangs.

“Are you alright?” she asks him. He looks at her all funny, making some guttural throat sounds that oddly sound like words. They do not speak the same language.

Disappointed and sad, Ariel stand up to go, but his hand catches hers. He starts pulling her to the water, and she lets him but tells him she’ll drown, and he nods as if he has understood. Even if he hasn’t, Ariel does not really care.

Gently he lowers her into the water, pulling her face under. When he speaks this time, she can understand. “Thank you,” he says, “you saved my life.”

She nods, unable to reply without losing her precious oxygen. All too soon, she has to return to land. Her human body is not made to breathe under water.

“Will I see you again?” she asks him, but all the reply she gets is the frustration and longing etched on his face.

She knows the answer either way. Her father won’t ever allow it. She runs back to the palace, hoping she won’t be discovered, but knowing it is too late.

.

Ariel is not allowed to come home for two years. The day she becomes eighteen, she leaves the school, and though there is nothing they can do about it, they are not happy about it.

She doesn’t care.

She travels to the woods west of the kingdom. There is talk of a witch that lives there, whispers of strange things happening and animals that talk. The King declares it nonsense, but Ariel is not so sure. She is learning that the world holds more than limits.

It takes her too weeks and all of her stealth. She keeps her red hair hidden, knocks on farm doors and asks if they’ll let a poor girl sleep in their barn. She sings as payment, or does chores. She earns her keep and money. She learns what she can do.

The witch is kind, and sad. Her skin green, but beautiful. She tells Ariel she can try, but she is not quite sure of the result. Her magic is something familiar and foreign at the same time, like a bone that broke and never healed quite the same.

The witch warns her: there is a price to pay, always. And once a spell is cast, it cannot be reversed. There is a turmoil in her soul, guilt on her body. She asks if Ariel is certain, and Ariel says yes. She is tired of being trapped, of having to be whom she is not.

The witch calls her “Little princess,” and Ariel is shocked at being recognized. She smiles, and shakes her head. She doesn’t want to be a princess.” The witch nods, and tells her she hopes it all works out.

She performs a spell, gives her a little bottle in which a luminous golden thing floats. “Go to the sea, and at midnight, pour this down your throat. It will hurt, and your lungs will always burn when you are under the sea. You will feel pain when you swim. And there will be a price. This is the best I can do, little princess. Please consider what you want very carefully. There is no coming back.”

Ariel thanks the witch and leaves. She travels back to the sea, and is too caught up in her fantasies to notice the beauty of the world around her. Only when something is lost, one truly learns to appreciate it, and she has not yet lost her world.

(she will lose her world, in a way, but she’ll hardly be lost)

When Ariel steps barefoot onto the sand, it scrubs her feet, grates between her toes. The salt of the water is coarse against her skin. This feeling, the sand between her toes, this what she normally hates, now makes her hesitate.

She tells herself she is being silly, seeing reasons to turn back, and that she’ll have no toes. This thought does more to fear than to comfort her though, so instead she steps further into the water, until her dress is weighed down by it, and becomes see-through.

Ariel sheds it as a snake sheds its skin, casts one forlorn look at the castle she grew up in, and the moon is the only witness to the girl pouring a burning potion into her throat, to a girl losing her legs and feet and her voice, to a girl that cannot drown but whose lungs ache every time she draws a breath.

The moon is the only witness to pale skin and red hair being swallowed by the darkness of the ocean.

And so—Ariel goes in search of her prince.

But this is the part nobody told her about: there are monsters underneath the water’s surface. There is a vast, vast endless eternity of _nothingness_ , and there are predators and claws and teeth and venom and stings and _monsters._

Suddenly, there is a sickly longing to be in her father’s arms, but to him, she is one of the monsters now. Suddenly, Ariel feels bereft, suddenly she realises what she has lost—a home.

She would cry if she could, but mermaids do not have tears.

Ariel swims on. After her hair is snagged for the tenth time she cuts it off with a sharp rock she had found and used to defend herself. She watches the red locks drift away from her with something like sorrow and something like joy. She experiments, tastes seaweed and krill, tries to kill a little fish but finds herself unable to do so, attacks a shark coming after her and escapes with a gash on her arm, and realises she still bleeds red.

Ariel swims on.

Maybe she’ll find her prince one day. Maybe she will not. Maybe she will travel the world first. Ariel fell in love with the Ocean, not with a boy. Ariel fell in love with the world, not with a prince. Ariel fell in love with freedom.

Ariel was six years old when she made her first trip to the sea. It became her very first memory. It fueled her dreams for years.

Ariel is lost, but she _isn’t._ She’s wandering. She traded her legs and voice for a tail, to explore the world, to learn.

And so.

Ariel swims on.

**Author's Note:**

> I felt wholy uninspired towards the ending, but I needed to finish something. Maybe I'll come back to this. Hope you liked it. Do tell me if you'd expected it to end differently, or if you'd like a continuation (I'll see if I can get my muse to cooperate).


End file.
